Author
Topic: Design choices

No, I'm not talking about the character designs but game design choices, the ones that affect gameplay. This is a topic where you can list and discuss your favorite and most hated game design choices in RPGs.

I'll start:

1. Ridiculous way of getting loot or treasure. One of the coolest things about RPGs is seeing your characters grow from a meager level 1 adventurer with the most basic equipment and progressively get better and better and tackle the most dangerous foes. A lot of this depends on the equipment and items you get throughout the game. But some games make some choices that baffle me. Worst offender: Icewind Dale. Whereas Baldur's Gate I and II gave you the most powerful items if you completed the greater challenges of the game (Durlag's Tower, Watcher's Keep), Icewind Dale, while retaining the neat combat system from AD&D and the Infinity Engine, adopts a way of handling items that is truly appalling. Let's say you already have a Short Bow +1 and a Bastard Sword +1 that two of your characters are using. In the dungeon after this you'll face creatures that need at least a +2 weapon to hit. So you do the current dungeon hoping you can pick some of those. You see chests, get excited but, what's this? The game decides you need another Short Bow +1 and another Bastard Sword +1, making for perfectly useless loot. If you wanted to get the better items from the dungeon, simply reloading won't do any good. You''d have to go back to latest save before you entered the area and hope that this time you get what you want. Pretty bullshit system to me if I may say so.

A game that handles items quite gracefully: Valkyrie Profile. In every dungeon you were guaranteed to get useful items, provided that you solved a puzzle to get to them. Plus giving stores loot from your travels to make you better items is also good. Even more, if you were able to kill a monster in one hit you would get an item, period, and in the ultimate challenge of the game (Seraphic Gate) this could mean some of the best weapons in the game.

I can understand how a designer wouldn't want to just give the best items in the game easily, but there has to be a balanced and meaningful way to do this. In my examples above, I put one of the worst ways of going about this and a good way of going about this.

2. Excessive random battles. Modern RPGs rarely have this problem, but in the past, dungeons were made twice as long simply because of the random battles. It's a chore to navigate through dungeons when you're interrupted every three seconds by a fight. And if you had to backtrack out of the dungeon, then that would mean even more grievance.

These are my top two. Feel free to add more and discuss examples and whatnot.

Warp magic/dungeon exiting magic, helps cut down superfluous playing time.Automaps, largely keep you from getting lost in dungeons.

Least Favorite Design Choices:

Save points. Just fucking let us save our game anywhere. I think the argument that letting you save anywhere makes a game easier is a load of bullshit, just look at the SaGa games.Any kind of randomization, be it random drops, random battles, etc.

The worst loot design I've seen is probably Dragon Age 2. I've been whining about it on my blog lately, but to sum up - painfully nondescript items that you have to keep cycling all the time plus 2/3 of all armor in the game being unwearable by any character. That on top of the typical Bioware annoyances of having junk in barrels all over the place and insufficient reward for rogues who pick locks because that might be 'unbalanced'.

I much preferred Diablo loot. The silly names for items made it clear at a glance what they did, and there were enough options that you had to make choices and tradeoffs for what you thought was important to your playstyle, or keep hunting and hope that eventually the weapon with the perfect set of bonuses would be randomly created. It scratched the obsessive shiny-collecting itch.

But really it doesn't take much looking to find a game that handled loot better than DA2!

When I first played Phantasy Star 4, I thought the "talk" feature was the best thing since sliced bread. If I was away from the game for a long period of time, I could click on "talk" and remember what I was supposed to do. Tales of Symphonia had a great synopsis system as well.

My other favorite design element I first experienced in Eternal Eden by Blossomsoft games. Encounters weren't random and if you won a battle, that enemy didn't respawn. This made backtracking fun because I didn't have to worry about needless pointless battles. I could just explore in peace. This is a big reason I did so many sidequests in that game.

When it comes to poor design choices, this thread is not complete without mention of Xenosaga II. The battle system had too many ingredients to it and it ruined the stew. Too convoluted for its own good and it was a total crapshoot trying to make battles work in your favor. They often dragged on far too long as well, even just normal garden variety encounters. Xenosaga II justified my purchase of a Gameshark.

9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors is an excellent game, but not being able to fast forward over puzzles you did already killed it for me. It made me not want to play the game more than twice through. Too bad, because it really was fantastic.

Although I liked the game Septerra Core, some of its design choices, while not bad by themselves per se, added up. Couple slow character movement with overly long dungeons and overly drawn out battles and that kinda kills it. Just one of those things is merely a minor annoyance but the combination is not so great. Dam near useless magic system wasn't great either.

Does your game have over 10+ classes available to choose from?Are at least 1/3rd of those unique archetypes beyond the standard D&D "Fighter, Mage, Archer, ect."?When I change a class does my physical appearance actually change?

If you answered yes to all three then congratulations! You just ensured I will play your game no matter what it is!

2. Costumes/Physical Customizers

Sort of a personal hangover from FTP MMORPGs but I absolutely love it when I can customize my protagonist's outfit to my tastes. It's just that little something "extra" that helps it feel like "my" world; allowing me to lose myself into it even more.

3. Choose Your Own Ending/Guy/Girl

Want to be the bad guy? Don't like Mary Sue Z who the game is really, really hinting (aka: shoving down your throat) should be your true love eternal until the end of time? Well the CYOE fixes that up quite nicely. Against as I mentioned in #2 it's just one of those things that help me feel like I'm part of the game; like I'm actually playing something and making choices rather than simply reading a novel that I have to sometimes press X a few times to get to the next set of pages.

4. Unique Tactical Combat Systems; That Matter

Grandia's IP system, Wild Arm's Hex system, things like that which break up the nearly dead horse "Fight, Magic, Item" tier menu system are breaths of fresh air and bring new life to the genre for me. I'll gladly keep the aforementioned tier menus around so long as developers keep making new systems like these to give me diversity in the genre. A counter example to this would be the Disgaea series. Stacking towers of character? Geo Systems? Magichange? Reincarnation? And more? Shame like..maybe one or two of those ever come into play during the main story. And some of those are only important for like 2-5 maps tops. Even then odds are your MC has such a statistical advantage that you can just ignore everything and "hulk smash" your way through.

Abhor:

1. Magic > Melee Imbalance

Games like the Final Fantasy series have always been huge deal breakers when it comes to this. Why have a fighter as anything other than a meat shield when spamming Fire -> Fire 2 -> Fire 3 -> Ultima pretty much OHKOs everything? MP has never been much of an issue in games like that because of plentiful ethers/resting points. Magic as a cop-out/ultimate damage dealer has always been a peeve like that to me. In games like Persona 3/4 or Grandia do it right. Persona, although you pretty much "have" to use it to win battles, gives you just enough MP that spamming it will drain your resources quickly. That and standard melee never feels like a waste. In Grandia sure magic was super powerful but oh so very slow to charge. Quite often it might've been more tactical to use a Combo to stall, a Cancel to set back a major incoming attack, or a Special for faster yet still high damage.

2. Item Crafting Systems

Sorry Gust fans; but I have always found Item Crafting in any RPG to be rather pointless and poorly executed. Between different counts of item failure rate, having to track over hill and dale for recipes, grinding out hours upon hours for the last few materials you need to make super item X, repeating the same crafting scheme over and over to make basic materials, or being punished/screwed for not making that "one" item either in terms of story or combat...yeah, IC can go die in a fire alone with strip-based gameplay. Speaking of...

3. Fanservice > Lore & Mechanics

Endless innuendo? Characters wearing less clothing than string bikini day at a nudist beach? What purpose does it serve in game? How is it justified in the world? It doesn't and is not. Granted I'm not objectionable against a little bit of fanservice here or there; that's just pretty much inevitable in virtually anything produced by humans. However the rate at which the "base level" has descended to the days is...irksome. To put it mildly. So much so that between games like Ar Tonelico, or X Blades or, insert typical Japanese or American game here that more effort is put into the fanservice than the parts of the game that really, truly matter. Priorities have been skewed.

4. False Advertised Hybrids

Don't get me wrong. If someone wants to cross a Shooter with an RPG; that's their business. I've played some pretty decent hybrid RPGs...online, for free, on flash game sites. Modern, production value hybrids seem to skew in favor of their non-RPG half yet still try to advertise themselves as being RPGer friendly. I'm looking at Fallout in particular (Fool me once: F3. Fool me twice: FNV.) Tactical RPG combat you say? Like VATS running out of AP so fast you basically have to spray and pray over 60% of gameplay? Like stats meaning absolutely nothing since a low Strength, high Perp, high Skill character does crap damage with guns but can pick up a metal rod, swing it blindly about, and be far more effective in combat? Yeah I want my $66 back.

I'll just stick to outing ridiculous amounts of forced/meaningless grinding in a handheld RPG. I'm looking at you Sword of Mana and your 'every ten levels of weapon proficiency nets you a slightly improved rate of filling out your special gauge' or your 'every level of light magic increases your sole healing spell's effectiveness by 1HP per level' or even your 'to temper up a weapon or armor beyond its base stats you must collect an additional piece of base material in addition to the fruit/veggie that you need for the stat increase regardless of just how rare the original piece of base material was to get in the first place (I'm specifically referencing the Crystal material which can only be gotten by trading a rare aerorite collected from the rare drop of a rare and difficult enemy that rarely spawns on only one particular screen in the entire game far from any point of civilization or saving and there's absolutely no fast travel method available in the game and the enemy is really strong and is only weak to an element that commonly induces petrification which is a status effect that eliminates an enemy at the expense of gaining nothing from it, and you need 71 pieces to forge even a single weapon or piece of armor to its maximum potential and there are 8 weapon types and 4 pieces of armor available and you can only have one of any given type or piece at any time and any investment in any prior pieces is lost, and this doesn't even cover the seeds needed to grow the fruits/veggies necessary to gain the maximum yield from each tempering or the planting process one needs to follow to get the right fruit/veggie from the right seeds). And I'll stop myself here before I get started on my other complaints about what Squeenix did to FFA or the Mana series in general after SD3.

These are my opinions on new game. Don't try to apply my arguments to old games (necessarily) and expect me to still agree. I respect the times games were made in and have understanding of the limitations of the times.

Favorite:

Class systems - I like party building. Non exchangeable party members is very important to me. It helps inform characters personalities. Adds strategic choices. Informs the world's setting.

Loot based reward systems - Dropping gold was fine, but not realistic unless the enemy was human, etc. Skinning monster and selling their bits off to traders who can then make you items makes perfect sense!

Turn based battles that require strategy - I think ATB or WTB are still incredibly fun so long as the game adjusts difficulty to make the decisions important. You know, actually strategy.

Diverging Story Paths - Key events whose outcome determine the future path of the game. It's great to be able to essentially have 3 or 4 stories in 1. Also, more bang for your buck!

Least favorite:

Karma systems - Oh man, how I hate these systems. Almost universally implemented badly. Want to be evil? Just kill EVERYONE. Want to be good? Just give stuff away and and refuse all quest rewards when given the option.

Choose Your Own Adventure - Similar to the Diverging Story Paths as above except the game is populated with many, many choices with no consequence whatsoever on the game's outcome. If you actually read any of these badly written children's books (and if you missed out I implore you not to and to discourage all of your young relatives not to as well) you'd know that almost all the choices lead to you dying. Some choice, huh?

Button Mashing Action - It really bugs me when people say "You actually swing your sword and cast spells instead of standing around waiting for your turn!" when that requires 2 buttons. One for swinging and one of casting. It's boring. In this day and age when so much more can be done with action games, I expect more to be done.

When the realism fits the level of fantasy. If the game is realistic, then I don't mind realistic economic systems. But if the game is pure fantasy, don't try to make it realistic by making me loot monsters and sell hydes, that's just a waste. This goes for random battles and other gameplay elements that may be unrealistic, but WORK, as long as the game itself is unrealistic.

Be it enemies or loot, level scaling effectively takes most of the challenge and excitement out of the game. No matter what comes against you, you can be sure it's never too hard or easy, and you always find loot, that's only slightly better or worse than your current equipment. Level-scaling also takes all the fun away from leveling up, since it doesn't feel like you're getting any stronger.

-Random encounters

This shit should be made illegal. Especially annoying in areas where you're trying to solve a puzze, and this crap is constantly bothering you.

-Casual gamers > fans

Happens quite a lot nowadays, Bethesda seeming to be the standard-bearer for this stupidity.

-Instant Travel

Turns you into a vegetable.

-Too much linearity

Essentially leads into the same problem as level-scaling: you walk a linear path, fight monsters, raise your level, get into the next town where you buy a slightly better equipment for all your party members and repeat. Feels like getting new equipment and levels isn't really doing anything, the difference being mostly in how much you grind.

-Too much running back and forth

Very annoying and totally pointless.

Like:

-Proper character customization

Both appearance and the abilities, but more importantly the latter. Helps identifying with you character and it's cool to actually be able to affect how he/she advances with his/her skills and not just grind levels with your attributes slighly rising in a predetermined way, a common "problem" in jrpgs.

-Static enemy abilities

When you see a goblin, you now it's going to have 50hp, do 5-10 damage, and net 50exp, so you know it's pretty easy fight when your a high level, or when you see a dragon snapper when you're level 10, you know you are fucked and better run away before it sees you, that's how you do it. Makes the game a lot more fun and exciting and actually feels like you're getting stronger when you level up (of course presuming the enemies don't spawn according to your level). Gothic (2 at least) has got this right.

-World with a "center"

Much like the city of Khorinis in Gothic 2 or Athkatla in BG 2, you discover new areas as you go forward in the game, but there's this one big city/area where you return all the time and where's always something happening.

-Open world

Kind of obvious, though doesn't automatically make a game good, like in Oblivion or Gothic 3 where the main quest fades into the too large world.

Oh man, where do I begin?There's so much that annoys me as far as modern design choices are concerned that ware I to list them all, it wouldn't be a reply, it would be an article.Instead Ill keep it short and just list some of the biggest offenders off the top of my head.

1) tunnel RPGs - No overworld, no exploration, just a bunch of tunnels tied together by cutscenes.2) AI controlled party members - There are a few games that manage to pull this without getting on my nerves (FFXII, KotOR, Mass Effect). For the most part though, I really hate it.3) Action everything - Now don't get me wrong, I like action games. But do I really need to hack, slash and platform my way through everything these days? Would it really be so terrible if we got a turn based RPG every once in a while?

When the realism fits the level of fantasy. If the game is realistic, then I don't mind realistic economic systems. But if the game is pure fantasy, don't try to make it realistic by making me loot monsters and sell hydes, that's just a waste. This goes for random battles and other gameplay elements that may be unrealistic, but WORK, as long as the game itself is unrealistic.

Dislike:

Gamers who complain about lack of realism.

When I think of a "realistic" game I think of Shen Mue, and that game was a bore. It was realistic, but not fun. It was all hurry-up-and-wait. But I'm with you in that I do like enough believability in my games where I don't feel like I'm consciously suspending my disbelief. I am aware that suspension of disbelief is pretty much a requirement in RPGs, but I like when they allow me to do it subconsciously.

People are raising a lot of good points in here, definitely a good topic to jump in on!

I find it a little tough, though, since it's really all subjective to how well a game executed its particular mechanic, but I'll do the bandwagony thing and attack the biggest ones on my mind that umbrella everything.

Also, I almost totally agree with everything ZeronHitaro had to say in their post above, especially about Item Crafting. I think a lot of games can do it better. I like the idea of it, but it's so rarely executed properly.

Dislike

All-action, all the time: With a game like Diablo, for example. It is a fun game for a little while, but you really need to take a moment to step back from it and not play it cause, really, it's x amount of hours of grinding, and that's pretty much it. There's so little story involved, really, that what's making this a RPG is mostly the stat growth aspects. I just dislike when a game relies on this mechanic, giving me nothing else to change it up with now and again, or enough of an engaging story to make it worth it. Makes me really not interested in Diablo III because, well, I've played that game.

Easy Fast-travel: Now, I'm all about fast travel depending on the circumstance, like in Oblivion or Fallout 3 and such. If I have the time to do a full day game marathon, I like to walk everywhere, take my time, see the beauty of the world. But, if I'm just playing for an hour or so before work or another commitment, I want to maximize my questing time and get from one point to another without the waste of walking time.Now, what I dislike about the fast travel systems is it's just too easy. I feel it should be earned or have a cost or consequence now and then. Like, in the old Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Fallout, random encounters could happen and disrupt your progress. Awesome. I think in Morrowind you could only fast travel via taking the Silt Striders (I could be wrong, though, as I didn't play enough of it to find other options). But it today's games, you can just go for it. Yes, I know the game accounts for in-game time as you walk the whole distance, but there's no consequence for doing so! "I need you to do this quest for me as quick as you are able. Can you?" "Yes, of course!" Then we decide we want to fast travel to x city to get something first, walking the whole way, then fast-travel walk to the site of the quest, and thankfully the object in question is still there, the horde of goblins has conveniently awaited your arrival to begin their assault, the old man hasn't died yet, etc. I don't think you should be able to fast-travel until you can find yourself a mode of transportation, be it a horse or an old beat-up future car you happen to get going again.

Tireless Heroes: Y'know, I get why this doesn't always happen, but still, it always bugged me as a kid as to why, say, Link never needed to sleep, no matter how many days and nights he spent running across the Hyrule Field fighting off skeletons and the like. How our heroes in Secret of Mana could just run for hours and not need sleep unless you wanted the benefits of insta-healing. I always liked the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale had the D&D mechanic of fatigue and exhaustion if you pushed your character for too many hours. In Fallout 3, you could perpetually keep walking and never need sleep unless you wanted to heal up. There's no penalty for wandering the wastes for the next 10 days if you wanted to. Like, really? I don't want super realism, but again, I'd like some accountability.

Automaps: I like having to explore things a bit, blindly, but I like to be rewarded for that in getting the map as I go along, or even finding a copy of the map somewhere, or purchasing it. I find FFXII did this right, if I recall correctly. I think that's the game I'm thinking of... Fallout 3 does this as well, when you look at your local map, and then back. Oblivion too. I just don't want it handed to me for nothing, pointing out exactly where I need to go.

Glowing Trails, Auto Waypoints, etc: Again, I see the practical, convenience-based application of this, but whatever happened to letting us figure things out. Like, I know you can turn it off in Fable II/III, but then you pretty much have no idea where to go without it. Like, whatever happened to hints? Whatever happened to gathering information? "Go to the town of Evensley, ask around for a man named Kole. Find him and he'll give you what you need." "Travel to the east a few hours, eventually the land will break into the forest and you'll see a cavern. This is the troll's cave, where your quest shall take you." As seems to be my theme above, I like discovering things for myself, earning it, not having the developers hand it to me. If I find it and choose to assign my own waypoint, awesome. Otherwise, give me some clues! Albion is not littered with GPS markers in the Industrial Age!

Like

Save Anywhere: I like how save points did make you strategize how you went about things, but times have changed, and games geared for late teens and adults need to take into account just how busy our lives get. We need to be able to drop the game at a moments notice and gtfo most of the time. I like that in some games it stops you if there's an immediate threat, but beyond that, you can save whenever needed, which is a great addition to any game, as Der Jermesiter said.

Grand, Open Worlds: Love having a big world to explore, that's interesting and captivating. Although it was lots of rolling hills, Oblivion's world was just plain beautiful to take in. However, I still think FFXII tops it for me. A lot of people like to rag on that game, but I think they'd have to agree that the world of Ivalice they fashioned is gorgeous. Every texture, every geographical formation, all of it filled me with a sense of wonder on every new map I stepped foot onto. On a much more narrow scope, but still filled me with amazement, is the likes of Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. As a kid, I always loved exploring those worlds, and how pretty they seemed, how lush and colourful and different from my own world (Well, may the Future in CT wasn't so lush, but you get the idea...)

Genuine Lore: I like the idea a lot of games are taking nowadays in trying to flesh out their worlds by providing the player with a storehouse of background info. However, in some cases, it can be overwhelming, like in Oblivion or Morrowind, with all the books you can read. Hell, I I have enough books on my REAL bookshelf to go through, nevermind the dozens of paperbacks I steal from people's shelves in game. But, the codex system of Mass Effect offered a nice, concise location for it all, and it's never too too much to read, as long as you do it in bits here and there when something seems interesting to you. It's just cool to know there's more going on than just what you see.